SOCALSapper
LE
You are comparing a city vs a nation... What is a Narco state if it isn't chopping heads off with videos, rampant corruption throughout the government and military/police, Mass graves, missing busloads of students, helicopters being RPG'ed out of the sky and cops ambushed with .50 cals and IEDs?I was trying to put it into context in the rest of that paragraph when I said that the murder rate in Mexico is roughly the same as the murder rate in Washington DC, which by the way is far from the highest in the US. Perhaps I was being too subtle.
While the crime rate is appalling in European or Canadian terms, I think that calling Mexico a "narco-state" or a "nascent failed state" as some people are inclined is being a bit melodramatic when parts of the US are as bad or worse.
What the violence lacks in Mexico is any sort of political character. While it may be unpleasant, it doesn't directly threaten the stability of the state. It does upset the populace, but so far they haven't seen overthrowing the government as being any sort of solution.
The murder rates in Colombia or Brazil by the way are as high or higher and have been for many years. Much of Latin America and the Caribbean is quite violent. The anomalies in the Western Hemisphere fact are Canada and a couple of minor European colonial possessions, where the murder rates are more similar to those of Europe.
Here's a list that makes for interesting reading.
Aside from a few outliers like South Africa and a few other places in Africa, there isn't any place else on earth which is as violent as this region. If you look at the top 20 countries or territories in terms of murder rate, 18 are in Centra America, South America, and the Caribbean, and the remaining two are in Africa (South Africa and Lesotho). If you look at the total number of murders committed in the world, nearly two thirds of them are in the top 10 countries (Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Venezuela, United States, Russia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Half of those are in the Western Hemisphere (Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, the US, Colombia).List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
But even within that set of data there are huge variations for no obvious reason. For example, the murder rate in Nicaragua, while high, isn't much higher than that of the US. The rates in neighbouring Guatamala, Honduras, and El Salvador though are multiple times higher and the highest in the world.
Mexico doesn't stand out as particularly unusual in the context of the region as a whole. If they were to be considered to be in danger of being unstable due to violence, then some other big countries such as Brazil and Colombia are just as bad or worse, and that's before you get to the smaller countries in between and in the Caribbean where the problem is several times worse.
The murder rate is 6 times that of the U.S - and that's the bodies they found.
I have a Mexican guy that delivers supplies ( legal office supplies...
) and he has a vacation house in Rocky point MX. He has offered to take me fishing down there and said 'its safe, no worries'.Cue mass graves found and those searching were driven off by cartels. Local police dont want to find any more bodies as they haven't identified the initial ones they found.
I asked him about it and all he said is ' Don't ask me about cartels, I know nothing'. No fishing for me...
How many of those murders in the U.S are cartel related? The 18th street gang is the biggest street gang in the CA - most of the members are illegal immigrants living in the U.S, but they are heavily connected with Mexican cartels ( as are MS13 and many others).
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